Can anyone confirm for me whether a Finnish residence permit based on family ties (applied for in home country) has a timeframe within which you must enter Finland?

I ask this because when my (Finnish) husband got his temporary residence permit for Australia he had something like 10 months from the date it was granted to enter Australia. I haven't come across it in my research so far so I wondered if anyone has seen anything regarding this in their permit paperwork.

The reason I'm asking is so I know how soon to apply for the permit. I want to do it early enough that it is all sorted well before our move date so that we can all move together, but I don't want to get it too early in case it has a restricted timeframe to use.

We will probably do the interview for our child's Finnish passport at the same time so I also need to factor in the time it will take to receive the passport.

Any experiences you would like to share about dealing with the Canberra embassy would be appreciated!

lily_of_the_valley wrote:Can anyone confirm for me whether a Finnish residence permit based on family ties (applied for in home country) has a timeframe within which you must enter Finland?.

It doesn't have some restriction.

Thanks.

I'm still unsure because I noticed in the forum post linked below that the poster has got start and end dates for their permit... Can anyone clarify this? Would I be given a start date as well or would the 12 months begin from date of first entry into Finland?

hi, my advice to you is to apply as soon as possible. on the application you can write the exact day you are planning to arrive in Finland. So let's say you want to arrive in November 2017 and you apply now and get a decision in 3 months. On your permit card you will see the start date as November 2017. So no problem if you applied early. But in the opposite case you apply later and you receive a decision in 9 months (yes it can take that long) and not make it in November. In short apply as soon as you can

I'm sort of on the same boat as you but farther along in the process. We live in the US but applied for a RP based on family ties last June. Back then we thought we would be ready to go by January 1, 2017 but are having trouble selling some property and weren't ready. Migri contacted me before making the decision to verify the date. I told them the situation and said that my best guess is now end of April 2017. No problem. I was tol that in that case the decision could not be made before end of January 2017 for an April start date. They advised me that we should make every effort to move during 2017 in this case. Good luck to you.

Thank you, best of luck to you! Hope you get a positive decision soon.

Looks like I won't be needing a residence permit after all, as we have brought our move date forward and there's no way Brexit will be finalised by then so I will still be an EU citizen (I'm luckily a dual citizen). Much less hassle and cost!